ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 reflects on the artist Somnath Hore's aesthetic of the wound, which represents history and memory via the scars left on land and bodies. Although most fully realized in his later sculptures, Hore has written about concept of the wound as originating in his early work on the famine and on peasant movements. These early drawings and woodcuts from the 1940s are most often associated with realism but share with his sculptures an attention to the impact made by violence on the body and land. In People's War, Tebagha, and The Tea-Garden Journal, Hore alternates between portraits of destitute people and agricultural workers and their communities. Hore's aesthetic of the wound concludes the book because it is an apt way of thinking about the legacy of the literary and artistic texts produced during the famine era. They are not transparent lenses into the famine but scars, traces, and fragments of the impact it had on the people and communities it unmade.
